Feel

One of my colleagues got a bout of serious gastroenteritis last week.

When we went through the patients together during the morning round, he could hardly walk. His stomach hurled heavenward, bile and acid scratching his throat as he told me the discharge plan for our patients one by one. He talked as if his tongue turned into flypaper; he walked as if he trousers would fall. My poor friend stopped after each patient (which he seldom has to) before he could go on, insides cramping.

But, and it's a very big but, what he learns from his own experience of being sick to the pit of his stomach turns into something that really sticks in the heart. He was rather surprised at himself after the illness, feeling what a patient feels. "As doctors, we should never be satisfied simply with how quick we send our patients home. Learning to talk to them and listen to them is the license we need to get," he told us.

Absurd as the moral of this story is, being sick himself is as important as a flu shot when it comes to what a doctor needs. Knowing how a patient feels is like an itch. Every day we reach for it and can't quite scratch it. Every day, it itches a little worse.

Some 50 years before, Herrman Blumgart, a Harvard Medical School professor, said it best: "The patient knows how he feels but doesn't know what he's got — while the doctor knows what he's got but doesn't know how he feels."